Barriers to the development of cultural responsive practices in ethnically-diverse schools
Paper presented at the British Educational Research Association Annual Conference, Heriot-WattUniversity, Edinburgh, 3-6 September 2008
Anne Hynds
VictoriaUniversity of WellingtonCollege of Education
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Janice Wearmouth
Deanery of Education, LiverpoolHopeUniversity
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Barriers to the development of cultural responsive practices in ethnically-diverse schools
Abstract
Two reports (2001, 2002) on school student achievement patterns in New Zealand highlighted a disparity between Maori and non-Maori students. In response, the New Zealand government launched a pilot action research initiative in a number of schools. This initiative was intended to support the development of more culturally appropriate school pedagogies for Maoristudents through collaborative work between ethnically diverse staff, students and local families. This paper draws on the results of a PhD study (Hynds, 2007) of perceptions of the maintenance of change in teachers’ practice in one of the pilot schools during the two years following implementation of the initiative and maps these perceptions against the framework of a community of practice (Wenger, 1998) to analyse why it was that the initiative was not sustained.
Wearmouth and Berryman (in press) note how the ‘communities of practice’ framework (Wenger, 1998) offers a clear way of thinking about how groups in schools function, how individual students, teachers, family and caregivers can be participant members of these groups and can be ‘included’ or precluded, from group membership. The framework highlights the kind of understandings, values, skills and relationships and the types of processes and tools that are central to the core enterprise of each group, for practice in the school and for conceptualising the school as integral to its local community. This framework therefore is used to examine how values, attitudes and beliefs within the school community which had been insufficiently explored prior to the action research, emerged during the subsequent two years to privilege some voices over others and constrain the development of a hoped-for-vision of reform.
Introduction and background
In New Zealand it has been very clear over a long period of time that there is a very large disparity in educational outcomes between Maori, the indigenous, and non-Maori students. Two OECD reports (2001, 2002) exemplify recent disparities. The differences in school outcomes have been explained in a number of different ways by various academics working in the field of education. For example, some have taken the view that socio-economic circumstances and/or family background and/or oppression of certain groups in society are the major contributors to such disparities(Nash, 1993; Harker, 1991). Others have viewed in-school practices, including curricular structure and provision as major contributing influences (Alton-Lee, 2003; Bishop, Berryman, Tiakiwai & Richards, 2003).
Particular explanations are bound to lead to different views about what might be done about such disparities and at what level: societal, school or family. Following the 2001 and 2002 reports the Ministry of Education took the view that interventions within schools themselves to change teachers’ practices should be a focus of government funding. Between 2001 and 2003 the Ministry of Education in New Zealand funded the first phase of a practitioner enquiry initiative in a number of schools across the country that aimed to improve teaching practice and outcomes for Maori students based on understandings derived from collaborative partnerships[1] between Maori and non-Maori within the broader school communities. Each school undertook, with the support of an in-school facilitator, to:
- collect base-line data on Maori student achievement and identify students’ learning needs;
- develop appropriate interventions (and professional development programmes for teachers) to address the most significant of these;
- implement the interventions;
- observe and record changes in Maori student outcomes; and
- assess the impact the programme had on Maori student outcomes and family (whānau)-school relationships.
The evaluation of the first phase of this practitioner enquiry, conducted in 2003, indicated positive signs of progress towards reframing the mainstream school experience for Maori students within several schools (Tuuta, Bradnam, Hynds, Higgins & Broughton, 2004).
The research (Hynds, 2007) discussed in this articleexamines the formation of one community of practice (Wenger, 1998; 2002; Wearmouth and Berryman, in press) that had formed within the staff of a mainstream secondary school to support the development of more culturally appropriate pedagogies for Maori students during the practitioner inquiry project and its disintegration in the two years following the initiative. It does so through the eyes of 11 of its members. Evidence from teacher interviews is triangulated with evidence from students and their parents/caregivers.
Communities of practice
As Wenger (2002) comments, ‘communities of practice’:
are groups of people who share a concern, a set of problems, or a passion about a topic, and who deepen their knowledge and expertise in this area by interacting on an ongoing basis. … These people … meet because they find value in their interactions. As they spend time together, they typically share information, insight and advice. … They discuss their situations, their aspirations and their needs. They ponder common issues, explore ideas … However they accumulate knowledge, they become informally bound by the value that they find in learning together. This value … accrues in the personal satisfaction of knowing colleagues who understand each other’s perspectives … Over time, they develop a unique perspective on their topic as well as a body of common knowledge, practices, and approaches. They also develop personal relationships and established ways of interacting.’
(Wenger, 2002, pp 4-5)
A coherent community of practitioners has a common enterprise, which here was supporting improved learning outcomes for Maori students in collaboration with the local Maori community. This enterprise binds the members together and gives a sense of working to a common purpose. Relationships between communities in schools form and develop through mutual engagement in common enterprises. Part of an enterprise becomes the maintenance of connections between community members. The real power of the school is mediated by any community’s pursuit of its own interest. To cut across the dynamics underlying the functioning of communities as a source of making and sustaining knowledge is to threaten the existence of these communities and their contribution to the institution of school (Wearmouth and Berryman, in press).
Communities are built around knowledge domains. Various sorts of knowledge domains related to different aspects of the formal and informal curriculum, such as what comprises effective pedagogy for Maori can lie at the heart of a community’s enterprise in a school. Knowing means being competent in enterprises that are valued. That is, participating in the effort to achieve the enterprise that is valued and is given priority. The knowledge held within a community of practice is not a ‘thing’, an object, something that can be bought and sold. It is living and developing as an integral part of the interactions of the community. What we might call ‘expert knowledge’ is dynamic, not static.
The domain offers common ground for a community’s practice and legitimizes and gives meaning to this practice. In healthy and effective communities in schools it is the insider’s view of the domain that guides the community’s learning and that ‘shapes the knowledge, values and behaviours to which they hold each other accountable’ (Wenger, 2002, p 31). This is why, the issue of power sharing over decision making is so important.
The domain defines the identity of the community and how much its achievements are worth in the school (Wearmouth and Berryman, in press). Attribution of worth and value adds an important political dimension to the notion of communities of practice. Schools can do a lot to create conditions for communities to thrive by, for example publicly valuing their knowledge production and enabling their voices to be heard in senior management’s decision-making. Or they can undermine such commitment.
Elements of one set of practices may be offensive or inappropriate in the practices of another community. Practice can therefore form a source of boundaries for communities:
Participants form close relationships and develop idiosyncratic ways of engaging with one another, which outsiders cannot easily enter.
They have a detailed and complex understanding of their enterprise as they define it, which outsiders may not share.
They have a developed repertoire for which outsiders miss shared references.
(Wenger, 1998, p 113)
When communities define themselves as in opposition to other groups, boundary crossing is very difficult because membership in one group is marginalisation and non-participation in another. Reconciling conflicting forms of competence in the practices of different communities across boundaries requires work.
Learning can be either enhanced or impaired when individuals cross boundaries.
If you allow yourself to cross boundaries of practice recklessly enough, then any experience or competence can be defined as knowledge or ignorance, understanding or shallowness, consciousness or unconsciousness, or awareness or oblivion; all you have to do is change the regime of competence.
(Wenger, 1998, p 139)
Educators interested in inclusion might well ask about the effect on learning of crossing boundaries between communities in a school (Wearmouth and Berryman, in press). Where the ‘regime of competence’ is defined as ‘knowing’ and/or ‘doing’ at a level way beyond a newcomer’s current level, and no adequate support from those expert in a community’s practice has been organised, then, clearly, that newcomer is likely to be marginalised. In schools, as elsewhere, boundaries are, in effect, the discontinuities between one community and others. Membership of communities and definition of boundaries are a function of engagement in valued community enterprises over time, the need to get things done and the formation of identities. Boundaries between communities can assume a particular significance in schools. Impermeable boundaries can ‘fix’ members in marginalised positions in relation to enterprises that are highly valued in a school, for example. Or they may serve to protect.
Identity is developed through practice as a constant state of becoming.
No matter what is said, taught, prescribed, recommended or tested, newcomers are no fools: once they have actual access to the practice, they soon find out what counts.
(Wenger, 1998, p 156)
Identities provide the context in which all the learning that might be significant actually becomes significant. The value that is attributed to the enterprises of some groups rather than others, or the way that a ‘regime of competence’ is defined in a particular knowledge domain, can be seen as a political issue in many schools (Wearmouth and Berryman, in press). ‘What matters is how a form of participation enables what comes next’ (Wenger, 1998, p 155).
Research methodology for the current study
Appropriate Maori-basedprotocols, as advocated for example by Bishop and Glynn (1999), formed an essential basis for establishing trusting and respectful relationships between the researcher and participants and for the development of an appropriate research methodology.
Research methods
Semi-structured, in-depth interviews were conducted with 48 participants[2] (teachers, students, parents/caregivers, principals, specialist teachers), in total, 19Maori participants and 29 non-Maori, in an urban high school. Throughout the process of interviewing, the researcher kept a detailed journal, as valuable information was often gained before the tape-recorder was turned on. The research journal provided an audit trail for recording hunches and decisions made about interview evidence and the research process. Participants were asked to comment on the validity of emerging results through a process of on-going member checks. Inductive analysis was used to identify themes and patterns which emerged from the collected evidence (Janesick, 2000).
The process of conducting interviews
Two interviews were conducted with each participating teacher (4Maori and 7 non-Maori) from the school over the course of 12 months, following the first phase of theinitiative in order to track their experiences of partnership work and their perception of change. The first interviews were conducted with teachers during the latter half of 2003 and the second towards the end of 2004. For the purposes of triangulation, interviews were later conducted in 2004 with 9Maoristudents and their parents/caregivers and 9 non-Maori students and their parents/caregivers.
Findings
As Wenger (1998) notes, practice in a healthy community is produced by community members through the negotiation of meaning. It has the potential for being highly perturbable and continuing rediscovery, or for being highly resilient and reproducing the old in the new. Analysis of the first set of teacher interviews in 2003 indicated that there appeared to be a coalescing of many of the teaching staff in the school into a discernible community of practice, whose central enterprise involved a commitment to open communication with Maori students, their parents/caregivers and family elders and that this was an important component of their commitment to initiating change in the school (Tuuta et al., 2004).
The development of practice in the community where practice included creating psychologically safe spaces for all participants to speak about their experiences and interpretations of mainstream schooling. Collective interactions were resulting in community practices of reciprocal learning that reflected both the ways that relationships between participants were developing, and also the purpose underlying the communal activities. Professional development sessions had been held in the local Maori meeting houses where teachers, community elders, families and students told, and listened to, personal stories about classroom, teaching and school experiences to learn from each other about the barriers to Maoristudents learning and progress in classrooms, and effective pedagogies. It was not only the telling of stories and the face-to-face honesty that was crucial in the development of community practice. It was also the reception of, and openness to, the stories of others. 11 teachers (4Maori and 7 non-Maori) talked about the importance of ‘shared experiences’ within the first phase of the project.
Learning as engagement in thenegotiation of meaning
Evidence from the interviews indicated that the experiences of Maori teenagers and young children, their parents/caregivers, community elders (kaumatua and kuia), as well as teaching peers, that were shared in a spirit of openness in school and non-school settings, had influenced the thinking of many teachers within the school. These teachers (4Maori and 7 non-Maori) recalled how everyone was given the chance to negotiate meaning within the group. Individual teachersdescribed how their thinking had been transformed during the first phase of the initiativeby listening to the voices of others who, typically, are not heard in discussions of the effectiveness of classroom and school reform:
… it was listening to the stories of kaumatua (elders) and of Maori students at the hui (meeting) and hearing their experiences of being in mainstream classrooms … so those hui were really powerful and I could see how classes were for Maori kids … it made me see my teaching quite differently … .
(‘James’, non-Maori teacher, 2003)
But having listened to the commentaries, the voices of Maori students and realising now that my whole teaching delivery was uncomfortable, suddenly the problem was there for me…. I couldn’t see the problem before. My eyes have been opened to that ... let’s start identifying what the problem is, and the problem doesn’t necessarily sit out there … , it sits here within us as teachers.
(‘Andrew’, non-Maori teacher, 2003)
These teachers likened their experiences to an uncomfortable awakening from a deep sleep, or from a state of unconsciousness which some described as a kind of blindness. The practice that was developing in the community was unsettling to many of the members. It was ‘perturbable’. It seemed that the sharing of experience of their own classroom practice through other pairs of eyes had been very empowering and had not been something that they would easily forget:
… it was listening at the hui (meeting), and seeing how classes were for many Maori students, and from their grandparents’ perspectives and becoming more aware… of what the cultural differences are ... . It was somebody from outside in the local Maori community, a kaumātua (elder) who spoke and some of the Maori staff spoke, it made me aware of what my downfall had been, my lack of cultural knowledge. I picked up so much more, and it made me re-think about why I was at the hui (meeting), it made me realise what does go on in my classes and re-think how I approach teaching … and the way I had been treating students prior to this.
(‘Max’, non-Maori teacher, 2003)
The unsettling effect of the sharing of experiences appears to have focused teachers on identifying and talking through their beliefs about effective teaching. Description, discussion and analysis seemed to enable them to weigh up and examine the contradiction between their beliefs and their practice, and between their practice and students’ needs:
Some of that was really tough data … particularly from their Maori students…., teachers believing one thing about their teaching and then having students giving data that absolutely opposed their beliefs, and teachers having to confront that gap.
(‘Shasha’ MaoriIn-school facilitator, 2003)
Other participants who were interviewed also noted that the discussions and the presentation of evidence from different perspectives during the sessions in the meeting houses had been an ‘eye-opening’ experience for some teachers:
I have been to a couple of their hui (meetings), down at the wharenui (large meeting house), where … some of the teachers talked ... and basically I think it’s been an eye-opener for the teachers from their point of view, learning about the needs of Maori students.
(‘Mr Huia’, parent/caregiver of Maori children, 2004)
Something significant seemed to have happened to these teachers, something that had clearly touched them, unsettled them and stirred a new level of consciousness in them.
Community membership means actively engaging and being competent in enterprises that are valued. Given that a sense of belonging is a fundamental human need, then the way that particular communities in some schools, their practices and the individual members can be differentially valued is of especial concern. The process of collective inquiry and dialogue was not usual practice in the school. Maori teachers who were interviewed explained that it was very unusual practice for them and whänau to have a voice and to be listened to within their school. For some, this was the first time that their own knowledge about students and pedagogy was clearly being viewed as integral to the regime of competence in the community and themselves as expert practitioners: